Life Kit - How to save at restaurants if you're burnt out on cooking

Episode Date: June 30, 2026

Do you blow $20 on slop bowls because you keep forgetting to pack lunch? Or can't help but overspend every time you eat out with friends? Dining out can be expensive — but there are ways to minimize the financial punch. This episode, reporter Joe Hernandez shares tips on how to dine out on a budget. Sign up for his one-month newsletter, How to Cut Your Food Bill, for more tips.Follow us on Instagram: @nprlifekitSign up for our newsletter here.Have an episode idea or feedback you want to share? Email us at [e-mail] the show and listen to it sponsor-free by signing up for Life Kit+ at plus.npr.org/lifekitSee pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Do you remember when we would go to that bar in Philly after work for Happy Hour? Oh, big time. The cheap pizzas and the generous beer pours. Yeah, I remember that. The Happy Hour deals were pretty key. I actually liked the pizza. Yeah, it was good at the time. I remember I would get a whole one for myself and people would think that I had gotten it to share with the group.

And then I would sort of take it to the side. Yeah, like do some defensive maneuvers. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like the arm around the plate. I remember people being like, you get really quiet when you eat. I'm like, yeah, I'm focused. Right. I don't want you interrupting me.

All right, well, you're listening to Life Kit. This is Mariel Segarra. I'm here with Joe Hernandez. We used to work together back at W.HY. We were both reporters at the time, right? Yeah. And Joe, you have been reporting on this topic actually, right? Like on food and how much we pay for it, basically.

Right. Well, we started thinking about how everything is so expensive right now, and specifically food, how food prices are just going up. And, you know, we were thinking about sort of what are people feeling about this right now? What sorts of strategies are they using to deal with this moment when it feels like food has gotten much more expensive, but we all need to eat? And part of that was how to go out and not spend a ton of money because many of us don't want to cook every single meal of the day and every single day of the week. So we're going to go out sometimes.

So how can you do that a little bit more affordably than you otherwise would? Yeah, because we know generally that eating at a restaurant or getting takeout is going to be more expensive than cooking at home. But you can't give the advice, never do it. Yeah. I think some people don't do it at all, but many people, myself, included, will go out to a restaurant sometimes or get takeout. And there are benefits to just being in a restaurant. I talked to Hannah Garth about this. She's a Princeton University Anthropology professor who does research on food access, specifically in Los Angeles. For a lot of people,

it's just about breaking from the routine and the monotony of eating at home. It's about alleviating the burden of the work of cooking a meal and cleaning up after the meal. But there's also a social benefit here. Restaurants are what's known as a third space, which is an area outside of our home or where we work, where we interact with other people. And those casual interactions with strangers, with acquaintances, they can actually boost our mental health a little bit. Yeah, I definitely found that when we were working together. It was like you'd have such a long day. and if every day I just had to go home and kind of cook by myself, I think that can get pretty lonely.

Yeah, and just even small talk with a stranger or talking with your waiter or turning to the table next to you and asking them how the dessert was. You know, those kinds of small interactions can just make us feel better and make us feel like part of a community. On this episode of Life Kit, how to eat out on a budget. All right, Joe, so what is your first tip? So the first tip that I heard from multiple experts is think about why you want to eat out in the first place. That's what Kimberly Palmer of NerdWallet told me. Are you going to try like a buzzy new restaurant or are you just out to socialize with your friends or your family members? Because if it's just to socialize, you get some more flexibility in choosing how you eventually decide to eat out.

You might be getting just as much value and enjoyment by going out for a less expensive pizza than a nicer restaurant. So just putting some time into thinking about why you're going out, what you want to get out of it, that can help guide your decisions. And your decision might be to not go out at all. Kimberly says she sometimes just orders catering trays from a favorite local spot and has people over to her house. And then any leftovers that come from that, she just has for lunch the next day. But if you are going to go out, she and others say first figure out that why, what you want to get out of the experience. and then give yourself a budget. Is there an amount that the experts you spoke to recommend for how much we should budget for eating out? Not exactly.

I mean, I think it's going to be different for everybody, but there are some strategies for how you could think about it. So one is to look back at your past spending habits and see how much you've been spending on food outside of your home. And then that would kind of be your starting point if you want to save money from there. And that might also highlight some patterns for you. So if you've been buying a salad or something every day at work, you could start packing your lunch more often. We'll have more life kit after the break. I always end up eating these slot bowls near our office when I forget to pack my lunch. And they're just like they're at least $15.

And I never like them. And it's just too much dressing a lot of the time. So by the time you get halfway through the bowl, you're like, I don't want to eat any of the rest of this. You know? Yep. And that for me is really just about the convenience. It's like I didn't have time to throw together lunch that day, which I mean, it is its own reason to eat out, right? You don't have to cook or plan ahead for that meal. Yeah. And if it's worth it to you to spend that money and save yourself the time, then it's worth it. But if you would rather not be spending that money and you just do it because you're, you know, you don't have any lunch prepared for that day. All the experts I spoke to said one of the most important things that you can do is plan ahead. And in in this case, that could mean like making a big batch of lunches over the weekend and then bringing it with you to work. And then if you do that, I mean, you're saving yourself more of your eating out budget for stuff that you'd actually enjoy. Right. You can kind of pick and choose rather than be limited because you ended up spending $45 the previous week getting those lunches that you just didn't pack. And then there's kind of like the question of where is that eating out budget? Because one of the experts I spoke to, financial counselor Lindsay Plum, says she keeps her eating out budget separate from her grocery budget. So the thinking there is that your grocery budget is kind of its own thing and that's just for groceries. And separating it from your eating out money and whatever other parts of your budget you have means you're not dipping into your grocery money for expensive restaurants or other costs that are just.

for fun. My grocery money does not touch, I call it our spend with joy money. The spend with joy money, I get to spend truly with joy, you know, not worrying whether or not I can pay my mortgage or buy the groceries or, you know, if the kids need leets. Because we have a sports account, and that's the one that's going to pay for the cleats. Our grocery account is going to pay for our groceries. And then there are a few kind of other things that the personal finance experts told me about budgeting. Sometimes restaurants will have these loyalty programs that offer discounts or free items so you could sign up for those. And then some credit card rewards programs also give customers extra points for spending money in restaurants. I think one problem that people often have

when they do go to restaurants is that they overspend. What can you do to avoid that? So one more thing before you even show up is to look at the menu, because the experts that I spoke to, they all said preparation is key to saving money. So if you look at the menu ahead of time, you can kind of come up with a game plan of what you might want to order a little bit better. You're not under pressure to do it when the waiter is like standing right next to you,

waiting for you to make a decision about whatever it is that you want. I feel like I do that anyway just because I'm always super hungry. Yeah. I'm trying to game plan like, okay, we're going to get in and I know what I want immediately. I don't have to, the waiter doesn't even have to hand me a menu.

And then I'm like, is it ready yet? Is it ready? Yeah. Right. And that's another thing, like showing up too hungry, you might order too much. Oh. Your stomach might get ahead of your brain a little bit there. I've done that. Some other tips like sharing plates to save money or skipping drinks or even using the time of day to your advantage. Like food deals tend to be a little bit cheaper during happy hours, for example. I find that sometimes it can cost more if I want to eat healthy when I'm eating out. I wonder what tips did the experts have for dining out on a budget and also trying to eat healthy food. Right. And there are ways to do this. So registered dietitian Amy Lawson told me that she encourages people to build their restaurant meals around protein and fiber. Those are the things that will kind of keep you full. And one way to do that is what she calls the balanced plate.

Half the plate is non-starchy vegetables, a quarter is protein, and a quarter is complex carbs. And some cuisines like Mediterranean might make that easier than others, and it can be hard to actually get that balance if you're ordering something like a soup or a chili where you don't really have control over that ratio, like a half to a quarter to a quarter, just making sure you're hitting all those categories of non-starchy vegetables, protein and complex carbs will help you. She says the key to making this possible, same thing with keeping track of your spending, is preparing ahead of time, reading the menu ahead of time, and then making that plan. Especially when we go to a restaurant and we get there and we are really

hungry, our hunger hormones are really loud and they are telling us, I want, give me all the carbohydrates, give me the simple things, give me the quickest source of fuel. So it can kind of muddle in our brain what we are choices in terms of making the healthiest choice. Yeah. Yeah, I feel that for sure. It can be hard if you are ordering an entree because they just played it the way they played it and they like give you the amount of protein or rice or whatever that they're going to give you. Although I guess you can you can start to notice patterns like in the places you go and maybe just get like a protein heavy appetizer or something. Right. And also I mean for me if a plate of food comes out, it's going to be hard for me to, like, not eat that plate of food. But one of her

tips is you can get a to-go box, right, when your food comes out and put half of it in the to-go box. And that will kind of control how much you're going to eat while you're sitting there. And by the way, there's a couple other small tips that Lawson suggested, such as you can ask to customize things. You could get protein from chicken or beans rather than steak, for example. And then if You skip the sugary drinks altogether. You're going to save yourself money, and it will be healthier. We'll have more life kit after the break. Okay, well, let's talk about takeout now.

It can be so expensive. So how do you save money on this? I mean, one of the simplest ways to save on takeout is to pick up your order yourself if you can do that. The website Lending Tree found that fast food and fast casual delivery orders in the top 10 U.S. metro areas cost nearly 80% more than if customers had picked them up. 80%. A lot, right? Yeah.

And so, you know, if the convenience of it is necessary for you in that moment, you can factor those fees into your budget. But for a lot of us, some or many of those delivery orders are kind of spur of the moment. It's just something that you have to do because you forgot to cook or you don't have the energy to cook and you may end up spending more than you intended. Yeah, I have often spent $45 on a delivery. meal and then it gets there and it's mostly rice. Right. Yeah. That's not fun. And actually,

some of the tips we got from readers touch on this about how, like, you could get takeout for the part of the meal that maybe you don't want to cook or can't cook yourself and then supplement it at home with something that is easy for you to make. So, for example, you could get a pizza and then at home make a salad or something like that. And I also think about not just what's easier to make, but what is more expensive versus less expensive, right? Like sometimes I'll go and I'll get like a protein heavy appetizer, like meat on a stick from the Thai place or the Greek place, and that maybe cost me $10.

And then I make the rice at home because rice is cheap. But if they put the two together at the restaurant, then they call it an entree. Right. This kind of touches on the idea of like planning, like how you're going to use this food because you're just buying. basically what you don't, maybe don't have it home or what would take longer for you to cook

or be more expensive for you to get and then supplementing it. Like maybe not every takeout meal has to be a full meal. And then there's kind of another phenomenon that's been popping up related to this in the last few years, which is people getting catering trays from places like Chipotle and Texas Roadhouse and then like meal prepping their lunches with that foods. And they say it saves them time that they would otherwise be. cooking and it could even be cheaper for them than going to the grocery store. So it's like hybrid eating out.

Right. Interesting. Any other favorite tips that you've learned in reporting? Yeah, we heard a lot. So, for example, go out for breakfast or lunch instead of dinner because it's often cheaper and the restaurant might be more chill at that time of day. You know, instead of going for dinner, meet up for dessert. You can use restaurant apps and coupons, limit going out.

and then commenters were a little bit split on whether to just make a meal of side dishes and appetizers to save money or to skip side dishes and appetizers and just order entrees to save money. But it seems like people do both of those strategies. A few other things, order off the kids menu if the restaurant lets you. Some people were doing that consider vegetarian options because they might be cheaper as well. Joe Hernandez, thank you so much for this. Yeah, no problem. Thanks.

That was reporter Joe Hernandez. All right, time for a recap. Takeaway one. Take a look at your spending habits. When you dine out, why are you doing it? Cut back when the choice doesn't align with your values. Like if you're buying a mediocre lunch every day because you haven't made the habit of meal prepping. Takeaway two, create a dining out budget that's separate from your grocery budget, your rent,

budget or any money that you have to spend every month. The money you allot to this dining out budget, you can spend on dining out, guilt-free. Takeaway three, avoid overspending when you're out at a restaurant. Make a plan before you go. Look at the menu. Go when there are happy hour deals. And if you get a big old plate of food, get it to go box right away and put half of it away to have as leftovers. Takeaway four, when you're getting takeout, avoid delivery. whenever possible. That makes it way more expensive. Pick up the food yourself if you can. And takeaway five, you can also use restaurant food strategically to supplement your eating at home. For instance, I like to buy some chicken skewer appetizers and then make rice or a salad at home.

Some people get catering trays and use them to meal prep. Think about the items that are cheaper a la carte. I find that you can often get meat sticks for a reasonable price on their own, but then the restaurant, add some rice and a wilted salad, and charges three times as much. Okay, and a few other tips. Go out for breakfast or lunch instead of dinner, because it's often cheaper, and order off the kids' menu if you're allowed. That's our show. Would you consider rating and reviewing Life Kit?

It helps us grow. Here's a review from listener OneL. I'm disappointed that I'm just now discovering this podcast. What great practical information and a great show. We're just glad you found us, Wynnell. Help us spread the word about Life Kit. Leave us a review in your podcast app right now. This episode of Life Kit was produced by Margaret Serino.

Our digital editor is Malika Garib, and our visuals editor is C.J. Riegel. Megan Cain is our senior supervising editor, and Lauren Gonzalez is our executive producer. Our production team also includes Andy Tagle, Claire Morae Schneider, and Silby Douglas. Engineering support comes from Jimmy Keely. Fact-checking by Andrea Lopez-Cruzado. I'm Mariel Segarra. Thanks for listening.